Why the most important questions in organisations are sometimes the ones nobody thinks to ask.
Imagine sitting in a leadership meeting where twelve experienced professionals unanimously support a strategic decision. The presentation is compelling, the financial projections are attractive, and the proposal appears to have the confidence of everyone in the room. From the outside, this might look like an example of effective organisational alignment.
But consider an alternative possibility. What if eleven participants formed their opinions after hearing the first person speak? What if several had reservations but interpreted everyone else's silence as evidence that their concerns were unfounded? What if the most influential person in the room had unintentionally established the boundaries of acceptable disagreement?
The decision might still be correct. However, the apparent consensus would tell us considerably less about its quality than we initially assumed.
This distinction between agreement and independent judgment has interested me for years, particularly through my engagement with organisational behaviour, psychology, and human development.
It also leads to a larger question: Who decides what is normal, and how do those definitions shape the organisations we build, the people we reward, and the decisions we make?
1. Organisational Culture Is a Collection of Shared Assumptions
Every organisation develops ideas about what constitutes appropriate behaviour.
Some expectations are explicit: performance standards, reporting structures, professional responsibilities, and ethical guidelines. Others are informal, communicated through the behaviour of leaders, the stories employees repeat, and the consequences of challenging established practices.
Over time, these expectations can become so familiar that people stop recognising them as assumptions.
A company might consider long working hours evidence of commitment. Another might associate leadership potential with confidence during meetings. A third might interpret agreement with senior management as organisational maturity.
None of these interpretations is necessarily accurate in every situation.
Working hours can reflect commitment, but they can also reflect inefficient processes or inadequate staffing. Confidence can accompany competence, but it is not a reliable substitute for evidence. Agreement can indicate sound judgment, but it can also arise from incentives that discourage disagreement.
Organisational culture becomes particularly interesting when we examine the gap between what a company claims to value and what its systems actually reward.
A company may celebrate innovation while penalising unsuccessful experiments. It may promote collaboration while designing incentives that encourage internal competition. It may endorse psychological safety while making employees reluctant to raise uncomfortable information.
These contradictions do not automatically imply bad intentions. They may arise because organisations, like individuals, can operate with assumptions that have never been systematically examined.
Edgar Schein's work on organisational culture is particularly relevant here. His framework distinguishes visible organisational practices, stated values, and deeper underlying assumptions that influence how people interpret their environment.
The practical question for leaders is not simply whether their organisation has a strong culture.
It is whether that culture helps people make better decisions, learn from mistakes, and contribute meaningfully.
2. Consensus Is Useful. Groupthink Is Not the Same Thing.
Organisations need alignment. Without it, coordinated action becomes difficult, and even excellent strategies may fail during implementation.
However, alignment should not be confused with the absence of disagreement.
Psychologist Irving Janis introduced the concept of groupthink to examine how pressures toward agreement may contribute to defective decision-making. His work has influenced discussions of leadership, public administration, and organisational psychology, although subsequent research has challenged aspects of the original model.
The broader concern remains important: group processes can affect how information is shared, evaluated, and incorporated into decisions.
Consider three different leadership teams.
In the first, employees agree because they have independently evaluated the evidence and reached similar conclusions.
In the second, employees agree because they believe their manager expects agreement.
In the third, employees agree because they assume that other members possess information they themselves lack.
All three teams may produce identical meeting minutes. Yet the underlying quality of their decision processes may be very different.
Research on informational cascades helps explain why observing other people's decisions can sometimes influence our own judgments, even when those observations provide limited independent information.
This is especially relevant in hierarchical organisations, where professional reputation, promotion prospects, and access to opportunities can influence how comfortable people feel expressing disagreement.
A useful leadership question is therefore not merely, “Does everyone agree?”
It is, “Have we created conditions in which people can arrive at informed judgments independently, and express them without unnecessary interpersonal risk?”
The quality of consensus depends partly on the quality of the process that produced it.
3. When Performance Metrics Become Definitions of Human Worth
Organisations need measurement.
Revenue, productivity, profitability, customer satisfaction, employee retention, and operational efficiency all provide information that can improve decisions.
The problem begins when a useful measurement becomes a complete definition of value.
A person's performance rating may tell us something important about their contribution within a particular role and evaluation system. It cannot tell us everything about their abilities, character, developmental potential, or circumstances.
Similarly, academic credentials can provide evidence of educational achievement without capturing the entirety of a person's intellectual capabilities.
This distinction matters because institutions do not merely observe performance. Their measurement systems can also influence behaviour.
When a particular indicator becomes central to evaluation, people may begin optimising for the indicator rather than the broader objective it was intended to represent.
This concern is closely related to what is commonly called Goodhart's law: when a measure becomes a target, it can become less useful as a measure.
The principle is not an argument against performance management. It is an argument for understanding measurement as a tool rather than an unquestionable authority.
In human resource management, the challenge is particularly significant. Organisations must evaluate contribution fairly while recognising that human capability is multidimensional, context-dependent, and capable of development.
A strong performance management system should therefore do more than classify employees.
It should help identify capabilities, obstacles, developmental needs, and opportunities for improvement.
4. Human Capital Is Valuable. Human Worth Is Not a Balance Sheet.
My academic and professional interests have repeatedly returned to the concept of human capital.
In economics and management, human capital refers to the knowledge, skills, capabilities, and other productive attributes that contribute to economic activity.
It is a useful concept. Education, professional development, and improved health can have meaningful economic consequences, and organisations benefit when people develop capabilities that help them contribute effectively.
But the language of human capital can become limiting when it is treated as a complete description of a person.
Employees are not merely bundles of productive skills. They are individuals with aspirations, relationships, responsibilities, emotional experiences, and lives that extend beyond organisational performance.
The challenge is not to reject the economic importance of human capability. It is to recognise that the economic value of human development and the intrinsic worth of human beings are different questions.
This distinction has practical implications for leadership.
A development programme should not be evaluated only by the number of training hours delivered. Its relevance also depends on whether participants acquire useful capabilities and can apply them.
An employee engagement initiative should not be judged exclusively by survey participation. Leaders should also examine whether employees experience meaningful opportunities to contribute, receive fair treatment, and exercise appropriate agency.
A talent management system should not merely identify high performers. It should consider how potential is recognised, how opportunity is distributed, and whether organisational conditions allow capabilities to emerge.
I explore these questions through an independent project called Human Capital for Humans, which examines the relationship between human development, organisations, and economic contribution.
My underlying interest is straightforward: how can institutions become better at developing people without reducing people to institutional objectives?
5. The Identity–Action Gap: Why Good Intentions Do Not Guarantee Execution
Another question that interests me concerns the distance between what individuals intend to do and what they actually accomplish.
Organisations frequently communicate values such as accountability, collaboration, continuous learning, and innovation.
Employees may sincerely endorse these values. Leaders may believe in them. Yet everyday behaviour does not always reflect the stated intentions.
A manager might believe in employee autonomy while routinely intervening in minor decisions. A team might endorse experimentation while avoiding initiatives with uncertain outcomes. An organisation might encourage learning while leaving employees with insufficient time or resources to develop new skills.
These discrepancies are often interpreted as problems of motivation or commitment.
Sometimes they are. But the explanation may also involve environmental friction, conflicting incentives, uncertainty, habits, or the design of organisational systems.
Through my independent conceptual research on the Identity–Action Gap, I examine the relationship between identity, intention, action, and the conditions that facilitate or obstruct behavioural execution.
The framework remains a research proposition rather than an empirically validated model. Its purpose is to organise questions that can eventually be examined through systematic investigation.
For managers, the practical implication is worth considering.
When employees fail to act on an agreed objective, the most useful response may not always be another motivational speech.
It may be necessary to examine whether expectations are clear, resources are available, incentives are aligned, and the work environment supports the intended behaviour.
Leadership is not only about persuading people to care. It is also about designing conditions in which caring can translate into action.
6. What History Can Teach Us About Collective Certainty
One reason I enjoy studying the history of collective behaviour is that it reveals how easily compelling narratives can become accepted explanations.
Consider the famous Dutch tulip episode of the seventeenth century.
Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds helped popularise dramatic accounts of speculative enthusiasm and financial irrationality.
Yet historian Anne Goldgar's archival research challenged exaggerated versions of the story, including claims of widespread financial ruin.
The interesting lesson is not that speculative bubbles are imaginary. Financial markets can clearly exhibit speculative behaviour.
It is that even our favourite historical examples of collective irrationality deserve scrutiny.
A compelling story can become influential because it is memorable, intuitively satisfying, and easy to repeat.
Organisations face a similar problem when interpreting business outcomes.
A successful company may attribute its performance to a particular leadership philosophy without sufficiently considering market conditions, timing, capital availability, or other factors.
A failed initiative may become evidence that an entire strategy was misguided, even when implementation quality or external circumstances played important roles.
Good organisational learning requires more than memorable explanations.
It requires the willingness to examine competing hypotheses, distinguish correlation from causation, and revise conclusions when new evidence becomes available.
7. The Attention Economy Has Entered the Workplace
The contemporary information environment has changed how professional knowledge is encountered.
Leaders increasingly discover ideas through LinkedIn, podcasts, newsletters, conferences, online communities, and algorithmically recommended content.
This has important advantages. Research and professional experiences can circulate beyond traditional institutional boundaries. Individuals can encounter perspectives that would otherwise remain inaccessible.
However, visibility and reliability are not the same thing.
A leadership framework may become popular because it is genuinely useful. It may also become popular because it is simple, emotionally appealing, or particularly well suited to the incentives of digital platforms.
The number of people repeating an idea does not establish its validity.
Herbert Simon's observations about information abundance and attention scarcity are especially relevant in this context. As information becomes increasingly available, the capacity to allocate attention thoughtfully becomes more valuable.
For professionals, this creates a challenge.
How do we distinguish an evidence-informed management practice from an attractive slogan? How do we evaluate a new framework without either accepting it uncritically or dismissing it simply because it is fashionable?
One possible starting point is to ask what evidence supports a claim, what conditions might limit its applicability, and what observations would cause us to reconsider it.
These questions are not obstacles to innovation.
They are part of responsible innovation.
8. Psychological Safety and the Value of Being Able to Disagree
If organisations want better decisions, they must consider the social conditions under which information is shared.
Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety is particularly relevant. Psychological safety concerns a shared belief that a team is sufficiently safe for interpersonal risk-taking, including asking questions, acknowledging mistakes, and raising concerns.
It does not mean eliminating accountability, avoiding difficult conversations, or guaranteeing that every suggestion will be accepted.
Rather, it concerns whether people can contribute relevant information without disproportionate fear of embarrassment or punishment.
This matters because organisations often possess valuable knowledge that never reaches decision-makers.
A junior employee may notice an operational problem but hesitate to raise it. A researcher may identify a methodological limitation but worry about delaying a project. A manager may privately question a strategic assumption but remain silent because senior leadership appears committed.
The organisation then loses access to information that could improve its decisions.
Leaders can help by inviting specific counterarguments, acknowledging uncertainty, responding constructively to concerns, and distinguishing disagreement with an idea from disloyalty to a person.
These behaviours do not guarantee better outcomes in every situation. But they can improve the conditions under which evidence is surfaced and evaluated.
The goal is not an organisation in which everyone disagrees.
It is an organisation in which agreement becomes more meaningful because disagreement was genuinely possible.
9. Education and the Future of Organisational Capability
These concerns eventually return us to education.
If educational institutions primarily reward the reproduction of established answers, how effectively do they prepare people to navigate situations in which the correct answer is uncertain?
If organisations primarily reward immediate performance, how consistently do they create opportunities for long-term capability development?
Neither question has a simple answer.
Foundational knowledge, professional standards, and reliable procedures are essential. Independent judgment becomes more useful, not less, when it is supported by genuine competence.
But organisations increasingly operate in environments where individuals must interpret ambiguous information, work across disciplines, collaborate with different perspectives, and revise decisions as circumstances change.
This makes the development of judgment, adaptability, and interpersonal capabilities especially relevant.
My broader exploration of education and human development is motivated partly by these questions.
I am interested in educational approaches that treat people as developing human beings rather than merely as future holders of credentials.
The connection to organisational behaviour is direct. The capabilities that institutions cultivate influence the kinds of teams, leaders, and workplaces that eventually emerge.
Human development is not simply a concern for schools and universities.
It is a continuing responsibility shared across educational, professional, and social environments.
10. Why I Created a Project Called Madness
These reflections led me to create an independent digital project titled Madness: Who Decides What Is Normal?.
The title is intentionally provocative, but its purpose is philosophical rather than clinical. It does not seek to diagnose individuals, romanticise psychological suffering, or challenge evidence-based healthcare.
Instead, the project examines how societies develop shared beliefs, how institutions influence definitions of normality, and how collective judgments can become both extraordinarily useful and occasionally misleading.
It draws upon thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Georges Canguilhem, and Émile Durkheim, alongside research and historical examples concerning groupthink, informational cascades, financial speculation, and collective behaviour.
The interactive website includes reflective material, a thought experiment, and a reading collection for those interested in exploring the underlying ideas.
I developed it as part of a wider independent collection of research interests, writing, and creative experiments available through sahiltayal.com.
The purpose is not to present a finished theory of human behaviour. It is to create a space where questions from psychology, management, philosophy, education, and everyday life can inform one another.
Conclusion: Strong Organisations Need More Than Strong Consensus
Perhaps the most important lesson is that collective agreement is neither inherently wise nor inherently foolish.
Human cooperation depends on shared knowledge, trust, professional standards, and institutions capable of coordinating activity at scale.
The question is whether those systems also preserve the capacity to learn.
An organisation that cannot question its assumptions may continue operating efficiently long after those assumptions have become outdated.
A leadership team that rewards agreement more consistently than judgment may struggle to recognise emerging problems.
A performance system that mistakes its indicators for the full reality of human contribution may overlook capabilities it was designed to develop.
And a professional culture that values certainty above curiosity may discourage the very learning required to remain effective.
For me, the central leadership question is not whether everyone agrees.
It is whether people have the knowledge, opportunity, and freedom to contribute their best judgment.
The strongest organisational cultures are not necessarily those in which everyone thinks alike. They are those in which people can think carefully together, disagree constructively, and still coordinate effectively.
That is the kind of organisational maturity worth developing.
About the Author
Sahil Tayal is a New Delhi–based writer, independent researcher, entrepreneur, and creative experimenter working across organisational behaviour, human capital, education, psychology, technology, and creative practice.
He holds an MBA from Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies (JBIMS), Mumbai, and a Bachelor of Commerce degree from Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi. His professional experience includes consulting, research, and business, informing his interest in how organisations function and how people develop within institutional environments.
His independent work examines the relationship between identity and action, the role of organisational systems in shaping behaviour, the development of human capabilities, and the psychological assumptions underlying conventional definitions of success.
He also develops interactive educational websites and creative projects, including House of Venus, an independent exploration of fragrance, mood, memory, and personal expression.
His broader intellectual endeavour is described as A Study in Consciousness by Consciousness.
Explore My Research, Writing & Projects
Organisational Behaviour & Human Development
Human Capital for Humans — Exploring how organisations can develop human capabilities while recognising that human worth extends beyond productivity.
The Identity–Action Gap — Independent conceptual research examining the relationship between identity, intention, environmental friction, and behavioural execution.
Education & Human Development — Exploring learning, capability development, emotional literacy, and the future of education.
Psychology, Philosophy & Social Behaviour
Madness: Who Decides What Is Normal? — The interactive companion to this article, examining social norms, collective beliefs, conformity, and the limits of certainty.
Consciousness — An ongoing exploration of awareness, identity, perception, and human experience.
Creative Practice & Personal Exploration
House of Venus — An independent perfumery project exploring mood, memory, identity, and emotional expression through fragrance.
My Story — The personal and professional journey connecting business, organisational psychology, research, writing, and creative experimentation.
The Larger Collection
sahiltayal.com — My central website and gateway to independent projects, research interests, writing, and interactive experiences.
sahiltayal.online — A wider collection of philosophical reflections, creative work, and digital experiments.
Medium Essays — Long-form writing on human behaviour, education, culture, psychology, and personal development.
I welcome thoughtful discussion, alternative interpretations, and evidence-based disagreement. These projects are evolving explorations rather than declarations of final certainty.
References & Further Reading
Edgar H. Schein — Organizational Culture and Leadership. Foundational work examining organisational culture, underlying assumptions, and leadership.
Irving L. Janis — Victims of Groupthink. An influential examination of group decision-making and pressures toward consensus.
Amy C. Edmondson — Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams (1999), Administrative Science Quarterly. Research examining psychological safety and learning behaviour in teams.
Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer, and Ivo Welch — A Theory of Fads, Fashion, Custom, and Cultural Change as Informational Cascades (1992), Journal of Political Economy.
Michel Foucault — History of Madness. A philosophical and historical examination of social classifications, institutions, and the concept of madness.
Georges Canguilhem — The Normal and the Pathological. An examination of normality, health, and pathology.
Émile Durkheim — The Division of Labour in Society. Foundational sociological work on solidarity and shared moral life.
Anne Goldgar — Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age. Historical research challenging exaggerated accounts of Dutch tulip speculation.
Herbert A. Simon — Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World (1971). An influential discussion of information abundance and the scarcity of attention.
Donald T. Campbell — Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change (1976). A foundational discussion of how the use of quantitative indicators for decision-making can distort the processes being measured.
This article represents independent intellectual commentary and research interests. References to psychology and normality are philosophical and organisational in scope, not clinical assessments or medical advice.
Sahil Tayal
Still Becoming.
Preserved from the LinkedIn data export of 24 October 2026. Links and references reflect the original article; they are not independently re-verified here.